If you’re like many people out there, after making the decision to start up a weight loss diet program, you might have also decided to start omitting dairy products from your daily diet.
You used to drink milk in your morning cereal but now that’s gone. Yogurt was a typical snack at lunch but now this has been replaced with something else. Cheese you know is high in fat so that has definitely got to go.
While there certainly are some dairy products out there that are higher in fat and calories and thus should be removed so you can see results, other dairy products don’t have nearly as many calories or are not high in fat.
Must they go to?
Recently researchers set out to examine the association between dairy intake and body weight.
Study Design
The 338 participants (both men and women) in the research study were assigned to one of two different diets. One was classified as low dairy and was one serving or less of dairy products and the second was a diet that consisted of three or more servings of dairy a day.
They were put on weight loss diets consisting of similar energy and food intakes from baseline to 3 months, at which point they entered into a weight maintenance period from 4-9 months where the differing dairy consumption was introduced.
The readings taken were body weight, blood chemistry, blood pressure, resting metabolism, and respiratory quotient.
In addition to this, the diets were based around energy intake, calcium intake, dairy intake, and physical activity, to ensure that accurate measurements and outcomes were seen.
The Results of the Study
The results of this study indicated that during the weight maintenance phase, there were no overall significant differences for the weight or body composition measurements. In fact, in one segment of the groups, the high dairy intake eaters actually showed better maintenance of body composition and weight, while the low dairy eaters demonstrated a weight gain.
Furthermore, the higher dairy intake group also showed increased energy intakes during the maintenance phase despite maintaining their body weight, demonstrating that had an increased rate of fat oxidation.
Practical Applications
Therefore, the results of this study demonstrate that there is no need to eliminate dairy from your daily diet and including it in appropriate amounts may actually prove to be very beneficial as far as weight maintenance and fat burning is concerned.
Reference:
Baily, BW. et al. (2008) Effects of dairy intake on weight maintenance. Nutr Metab (Lond). Oct 24;5:28.
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